On a Monday
by Winterfield
Summary: The problem with James T. Kirk, Nyota decided two months into her academy career, was that he spent so much time trying to look like he didn't try that he ended up with none to actually try.


The problem with James T. Kirk, Nyota decided two months into her academy career, was that he spent so much time trying to look like he didn't try that he ended up with none to actually try.

She arrived at this gem of a conclusion during the first class of a monday morning, slouching over her desk with as much dignity as anyone could ever have in such a posture. She usually liked studying; some of her classes ranged from exciting to absolutely fascinating, some would look great on her resume, some were even worth getting up on a monday morning after three hours of sleep. Basic Starfleet Protocol wasn't one of either. It was, on the other hand, the one course all cadets in their first year were required to take, so here she was.

The professor changed his holo-slide with the flick of a wrist and chattered on about the standard message form between a starship and a starbase during a non-emergency. It was a repetition of what communication and command students had already covered, simplified beyond recognition. Not quite listening, she allowed her eyes to wander five rows down, where Kirk seemed to be… playing with an andorian student's antennae. That conduct was bound to earn him a left hook to the nose, but with the acoustics of the auditorium, she could clearly hear the zhen's muffled giggles.

She's never heard an Andorian giggle before.

It wasn't that she disliked Kirk, exactly. He may have been a player and a flirt, but he never tried to claim otherwise. What bothered her about him wasn't the way he treated her - which was, admittedly, easy to attribute to the fact that they never spoke since the very night they met - but the way he presented himself. Brilliant, yet utterly careless.

Their first meeting did nothing to convince her he was above average in anything but his pretty face. Anyone could pick up the names of a few linguistic sub-disciplines and recite them in a sexy drawl at a drinking woman. On the other hand, turning the minor mistake of a history professor into an hour-long discussion… she could try to rationalize it all she wanted, say that the teacher couldn't have been all that good if he was instructing the basics of yet another mandatory subject, but in the end of the day, it was impressive on Kirk's part. Worse yet, it was something she herself would have done. She would do it with the same dismissive confidence, but also with her back straight as an arrow and her voice meticulously precise as she argued her point.

What bothered her was the way Kirk adjusted his tone and his body language, the nearly vulgar way he half-opened his mouth to look stupid, all the while proving over and over again that he wasn't. For all that it was clearly an act, she couldn't help but wonder if he even realized he was doing it.

"Hey, Nyota," Gaila asked. Even though the seats around them were full in all directions, her voice was not quite a whisper. „What's wrong?"

"It's Uhura," she hissed back, out of habit if nothing else. She was vaguely aware that it wasn't a very useful habit to have.

When Uhura first submitted her registration file to the academy, she marked the little box next to the words 'single room' without thinking twice. Having had a degree prior to her admission, she wasn't sure how she ended up with a roommate. It may have been a simple case of lost data, or there may not have been any single rooms to give. The large, shielded screen in front of the dorm complex did not elaborate.

When the door was flung open by a green elbow, she's been seconds away from marching down to the orientation building she had yet to find, angrily demanding why she had to share a room with some immature terran teenager. The woman who sauntered into the room wasn't terran, nor, from the looks of it, any younger than Uhura herself - and for some incomprehensible reason, she was humming an old song off-key. "You're Nyota, right?" she asked in near-perfect standard.

"It's Uhura," she answered. Gaila cheerfully informed her that 'people like her' rarely used family names on Orion and that she's never had a roommate before ("Well, I've lived with people, but you can hardly call them roommates"). After that, Uhura could hardly tell her she didn't want to be here. She went to the office the following morning to verify she wasn't paying extra for the room she ended up in; meanwhile, Gaila decided the two of them were best friends and sat next to her in every class they shared.

"Seriously, you look distracted," the redhead insisted.

"I'm just tired," she said. "Also…"

"What?" she asked casually, as though she wanted nothing more than an excuse to ignore the teacher's rant.

"I've been thinking. If someone could force Kirk to see a psychologist, they'd have a field trip with him."

"Ugh. He's an asshole, isn't he?"

She shrugged.

"Have you seriously been staring at him for the last five minutes?" Gaila's pretty face was painted with a knowing smirk. "Itching for a ride?"

"He's not a car," she said harshly.

* * *

She remembered the precise moment she decided Jim Kirk was a despicable little maggot after all.

It wasn't on the saturday night when they just happened to go to the same bar with the same people, Doctor McCoy hanging on the blond's arm like he would rather be facing the devil in hell than a group of twenty-something year old cadets, and she got drunk enough to directly turn to Kirk and ask him, "What were you up to the night we met, anyway?"

He took that as a cue to sit down so close she could hear his hair shift as he ran his fingers through it. "I think you know exactly what I was up to," he said, eyebrows wiggling and all.

"I meant," she clarified, "why you were dressed as a civilian and goading cadets into a bar brawl the night you enlisted."

The question of why those four cadets allowed themselves to be goaded into a fight by an apparent civilian remained unspoken.

"Ah, that," he said, "It wasn't exactly planned."

"The brawl?"

"The enlistment."

"Of course," she said skeptically. "Was it your perfect grade average that got you in four hours before the shuttle departed, or sympathy for your broken nose?"

"It was..." Something shifted in his expression - only for a second, before he put his obnoxiously flirty grin back on. Like an accessory. "Are you sure that's what you want to talk about?"

"I'm sure I want to talk, yes," she retorted. From there on, he spent the remaining of the night trying to get her to have sex with him, but she didn't begrudge him that. More than anything, she enjoyed the opportunity to get meaner and meaner as she kept turning him down.

She couldn't care less when he - as she's heard secondhand from at least six different people - strolled into the room where a written exam for command students was held ten minutes too late, either obviously drunk or obviously hungover, and proceeded to get the best score in his entire class. Neither was she angry when he thought he had (but most definitely hadn't) beaten her in a debate on first-contact diplomacy. All of those things have been terribly, terribly obnoxious, but he wasn't hurting anyone.

The day she decided once and for all that Jim Kirk was nothing but trouble was the day in the beginning of their sixth semester when she's caught her roommate crying in their shared bathroom, trying to convince no-one in particular that she was not in love with him.

"Forget about him," she said with fake certainty, stroking Gaila's beautiful red hair. As if she'd know how to deal with a relationship based purely on sex; as if she'd ever get involved in one. "You're the one who told me he was an asshole."

"That was then," Gaila choked out. "He was nice to me after that."

"He wanted to sleep with you."

"A lot of men want to sleep with me," she said. "Most of them don't compliment my programming skills."

"Oh, dear." Uhura hugged her tightly. She knew so many words in so many languages, and she hated having none to make it all better.

The next time she saw Kirk face-to-face, she had to pleasure to kick him out of their room.


End file.
